Posts Tagged ‘pixeljam’

Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork carries itself with confidence. Yeah, it’s a take on Galaga where you can run and jump around, and? So what? It’s also an energetic, colourful, and pleasant little thing set in a fun world that feels like a cartoon you’ve never seen before. Following a release on pocket telephones earlier this year, the collaboration between comic book artist James Kochalka and Dino Run developers Pixeljam arrived this week on Windows and Mac. I’ve paid my $3.99 (£2.50) to play it, so here, have a few thoughts to go with your news post.

Dino Run 2: Dino Harder (not its actual subtitle) isn’t simply more of the same. There are still dinosaurs and they’re still fleeing the Doom That Lurks At the Left Side of the Screen (actual Lovecraft story), but the variety of playable Cretaceous critters encourages exploration as well as fleeing. A recent update provides information about the Pachycephalosaurus. It’s a dinosaur with a hard hat growing out of its head, which means it can bash through rocks, topple trees and stun other creatures. Unlike the Triceratops, which is also a demolition dino, the Pachycephalosaurus is small enough to dart through tunnels, and agile enough to leap and bound. Pixeljam have also announced a set of “dino hats, heads and customizations based on characters from well-known indie games of the past and present”. There’s a picture of those below and I’m currently struggling to identify them all.

Dino Run is a game in which Velociraptors wearing hats flee from an apocalyptic event across procedurally generated landscapes. I hadn’t realised quite how long ago the original came out, in its first form, but here’s John writing about it before I was born. It seems like a difficult game to expand on but that’s exactly what Pixeljam are hoping to do, having launched a Kickstarter campaign for Dino Run 2. Three different eras, multiple playable dinosaurs…humans?

Pixeljam won the inaugural Colonel J Trousers Award For Excellence In Audiovisual Advertisements. The blustery ancient was so pleased by this excellent study in rural family life that some say a solitary tear crawled out from behind his monocle, although it swiftly hopped back behind the cataract-buttresses for fear of shaming the old buffer. To celebrate the availability of a Pixeljam bundle, including Dinorun and the Potatoman that so moved Trousers last year, a new trailer has arrived from the digital depths. It has altered my perception and you must watch it.

I could write a thousand words and I wouldn’t be able to explain Potatoman Seeks the Troof as eloquently as the wise old tiller in the video below. He says things like, “Strange year already, what with the bears nestin’ up under the crops, givin’ them the ‘tater shakes.” What I will tell you is that it’s the new game from the home of Dino Run, Pixeljam, and it’s available for $3 or in a pack with Dino Run, and other games and soundtracks for $10. There’s even a $5 pack with an album of music and a pixel game creation tool. The trailer alone is worth $20 though and yet, bizarrely, you can watch it below for free.

Let’s start off today with something free that could eat up a massive chunk of your Friday, in bite-size portions. You may remember Pixeljam’s Dino Run, it entertained John many a moon ago, back in the days when death by meteors actually seemed more likely than death by economic collapse. Detailing the last days of the dinosaurs in documentary-style pixel graphics, it’s a hectic race for survival, as meteors slam into the ground seeking to obliterate all life. The special edition allows you to customise your dinosaur (hats, dinosaurs in hats) and includes a couple of new modes, one of which allows multiplayer racing (several dinosaurs in hats). As part of the pack, which is only free today and tomorrow, you’ll also receive Space Rubbish and the spiffy soundtrack albums to both.

I’m loving this theme of dinosaur-based Flash games. Tonight’s is Dino Run – a retro-styled running away game, where you play a dinosaur, who is running away. FROM METEORS. It’s a fairly bleak day for dinosaur kind as the air pelts the Earth with angry rocks, and all that’s left to do is peg it, preferably saving as many eggs as possible. And, er, collecting DNA to impove your dino’s abilities.